Cultural and Creative Industries

[15:57 10/12/2007 5038-Bennett-Ch26.tex] Paper: a4 Job No: 5038 Bennett: The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis Page: 552 552–569

26Cultural and Creative

IndustriesD a v i d H e s m o n d h a l g h

The term cultural industries has been cir-culating in cultural analysis and policy formany years and has more recently beenjoined by another version of the same phrase:creative industries. There is understandableconfusion about the relationships betweenthe two terms, and an objective of thischapter is to reduce bewilderment in thisarea. To address such questions is morethan just an exercise in semantics, however.The two phrases emerge from quite differenttheoretical lineages and policy contexts. And,for all the considerable difficulties of scopeand definition that they raise, it is clearthat both concepts refer to a domain thatno serious cultural analysis can afford toignore: how cultural goods are producedand disseminated in modern economies andsocieties. A second objective of this chapter islinked to the importance of that domain. I aimto assess how various theoretical traditionsassociated with these terms understand therelations between culture and economy, andbetween meaning and production. My mainclaims are that the term ‘creative industries’represents a refusal of the forms of critical

analysis associated with the cultural industriesapproach, and that unqualified use of theformer now signals a considerable degreeof accommodation with neoliberalism. Butsimply to accuse creative industries policy ofcomplicity with neoliberalism is not enough.How might we critique creative industriespolicy and its theoretical underpinnings? Inthe final section of the chapter, I brieflyexplore one avenue of criticism, involving thenature of work in these expanding industries.1

THE CULTURAL INDUSTRIESIN THEORY

A common misconception about the termcultural industries is that its use impliesan adherence to Adorno and Horkheimer’scritique of ‘the Culture Industry’(1977/1944).It is more accurate to think of the term asan attempt to pluralize and sociologize theconception of cultural production in Adornoand Horkheimer’s brilliant but flawed essay,and to question some of the simplificationsarising in the adoption of the idea by student


CULTURAL AND CREATIVE INDUSTRIES 553

radicals and others in the 1960s/1970s coun-terculture. The French sociologist BernardMiège, for example, introduced a collectionof his translated essays in 1989 by outliningthe main limitations, from his perspective, ofthe culture industry idea: its failure to see howtechnological innovations had transformedartistic practice; its paradoxical emphasison markets and commodities rather thanon culture as an industry, as a process ofproduction with limitations and problems; andthe implication in the term ‘culture industry’that analysts were addressing a unified fieldgoverned by one single process, rather than acomplex and diverse set of industries compet-ing for the same pool of disposable consumerincome, time, advertising revenue and labour.However, there is another distinction crucialto understanding the term. The term ‘culturalindustries’ was not just a label for a sectorof production, it was also a phrase that cameto signify an approach to cultural productionbased on these and other principles, developedby Miège and other French sociologists, butalso by influential British analysts, notablyNicholas Garnham.

This cultural industries approach wasconnected to a broader set of approaches toculture that had come to be known as politicaleconomy of culture. Political economy in itswidest sense is a general term for an entiretradition of economic analysis which differsfrom mainstream economics by paying muchgreater attention to ethical and normativequestions. The term is prefaced with the word‘critical’ by analysts who wish to differen-tiate their work from conservative versions.Critical political economy approaches to themedia and culture developed in the late 1960samongst sociologists and political scientistsconcerned by what they felt were increasingconcentrations of communicative power inmodern societies – whether in the form of statecontrol or business ownership. Proponentsand opponents of political economy of cultureoften portray the field as a single unifiedapproach but it is more complicated thanthat. In other work, building on VincentMosco’s important overview (Hesmondhalgh,2007: pp. 33–37; Mosco, 1995: pp. 82–134),

I have distinguished between, on the onehand, a tradition of North American politicaleconomy of culture, exemplified in the workof Herbert Schiller, Noam Chomsky, EdwardHerman and Robert McChesney, and onthe other, the cultural industries approach,introduced above. The latter tradition ismore nuanced than the former, more able todeal with contradiction, and with historicalvariations in the social relations of culturalproduction, and most importantly of all, itprovides – and indeed is founded upon – ananalysis of the specific conditions of culturalindustries. This is significant because it meansthat the cultural industries approach has beenable to offer explanation of certain recurringdynamics, rather than polemically bemoaningthe processes of concentration and integrationthat are a feature of capitalist production –including media production.

Drawing upon industrial economics, cul-tural industries writers such as Garnhamoutlined the problems of capital accumulationdistinctive to that sector. Their definitionwas restricted to those industries that usecharacteristic forms of industrial productionand organization to produce and disseminatesymbols. This was very much centred on themedia. The problems of accumulation theyidentified included the especially high risksassociated with capital investment in this area,which in turn derived from the difficulty, evenin cases where substantial promotional andmarketing budgets were available, of pre-dicting which products (whether individualfilms, TV programmes or books) or creators(performers, musicians, writers, etc.) wouldachieve success. All capitalist productioninvolves risk to a greater or lesser degree,but there was a substantial case for believingthat the cultural industries were riskier thanmost. The cultural industries sociologistsforefronted other important features too.Cultural goods had relatively high productioncosts, because each recording, each film,each book, is a kind of prototype, involvingconsiderable amounts of investment of timeand resources, even at the cheaper, low-budget end. However, reproduction costsare usually very low. This high ratio of


554 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL ANALYSIS

production to reproduction costs means thatbig hits are disproportionately profitable incultural production, which helps explain suchphenomena as ‘the blockbuster syndrome’,where massive amounts of money are spentin order to generate a mega-hit which cansubsidize a company’s (inevitable) misses.Another feature of many cultural industriesis the tendency for the cultural commoditiesthey produce, not to be destroyed in use, but toact as what economists call ‘public goods’ –goods where the act of consumption by oneindividual does not reduce the possibilityof consumption by others. This public goodtendency creates particular problems forcultural producers concerning how to controlthe circulation of their goods. The recentfurore over digitalization of content, heardmost loudly in the debates over the sharingof music files over the Internet (sometimesknown in the early 2000s as the ‘Napster’phenomenon after the most famous early file-sharing site), is a manifestation of this featureof the cultural industries.

According to cultural industries ana-lysts, capitalists seeking profits from culturerespond in various ways to these variousproblems of accumulation in the sector. Tocounteract these conditions, many culturalindustries build up a repertoire or list ofproducts, in the hope that the hits will cancelout the inevitable failures. Because it is hardfor consumers to know what kinds of plea-sures will be available from cultural productsin advance of experiencing them, culturalindustries use ‘formatting’ (Ryan, 1992) inorder to identify products with particular stars,or as particular genres, or as part of a serial.In order to counteract the public good natureof most cultural products, cultural businessesand governments try to impose artificialscarcity, through the careful control of releaseschedules, and via limitations on copying(copyright law is crucial in this respect). Inparticular, the cultural industries approachemphasized the importance of control ofcirculation – the distribution and marketingof products as opposed to their creation. Thiswas the crucial nexus of power in the culturalindustries.

In contradistinction to some versions ofcritical political economy of culture, andto a great deal of left discourse aboutmedia production, the cultural industriesapproach avoids portraying cultural producersas monolithically powerful actors. Instead,there is an emphasis on contradiction andcomplexity. This arguably makes it moreapplicable to interventions in public policythan some other critical approaches. Unlikemany of the economistic approaches thathave come to dominate policy formation inrecent years, however, the cultural industriesapproach does not lose sight of issues of powerand inequality. I trace some of the ways inwhich the idea of the cultural industries hasbeen applied in the next section.

THE CULTURAL INDUSTRIESIN POLICY

The first impact of the cultural industries ideain public policy was through the auspicesof UNESCO, which produced a substantialvolume on the cultural industries in 1982(UNESCO, 1982). Miège produced a reporton ‘Problems which the development ofnational and international cultural industriespresents for artistic and intellectual creation’for that organization in 1983. Here the con-text was international inequality in culturalresources, exacerbated by the formidableinvestment in culture being undertaken byWestern businesses (an issue to which weshall return). The most lasting legacy ofthe term ‘cultural industries’ in governmentpolicy, however, has been in local rather thaninternational cultural policy.

In advanced industrial countries afterWorld War II, government cultural subsidytended to go mainly to the ‘classical’,legitimated arts, the principal exceptionsbeing public broadcasting and film. Therewere various struggles to include more groupsin the ambit of funding, in the interests ofdemocratization (see Looseley, 2004, on theFrench version of this). In the UK, for exam-ple, funding for the ‘fine arts’ was graduallyexpanded to the arts, and then to include



traditional crafts such as pottery and ‘folk’arts. In the 1970s, there were ‘community arts’movements, and in the 1980s an increasingemphasis on multiculturalism. As a resultof such battles, the content of subsidized‘legitimated’culture has shifted over time: forexample, arts cinemas came to be subsidizedalongside the opera and regional theatrehouses. One of the reasons that Jack Langbecame an internationally famous Ministerof Culture in the 1980s and 1990s was thathe attempted to extend French cultural policyfunding to forms previously excluded, such asrock, hip hop and raï (Looseley, 2004: p. 19).The seminal introduction of the concept ofthe cultural industries to cultural policy inBritain represented a more radical revision ofcultural policy than this democratic spreadingof arts funding. This took place at the left-wingGreater London Council (GLC) from 1983until the Council’s abolition by the BritishConservative government in 1986. The GLC’scultural industries policy was directed againstelitist and idealist notions of art but it alsowas a challenge to those activists and policy-makers who had concentrated on expandingthe field of arts subsidy to include new groups.Instead, it was argued by some at the GLC,cultural policy should take full account ofthe fact that most people’s cultural tastes andpractices were shaped by commercial formsof culture and by public service broadcasting.The aim was not to celebrate commercialproduction but simply to recognize its cen-trality in modern culture. One key positionpaper (written by Nicholas Garnham, andreprinted in Garnham, 1990) argued that,rather than on an artist-centred strategythat subsidized ‘creators’, policy should befocused on distribution and exhibition –the reaching of audiences. This argumentreflected the emphasis on the centrality ofcirculation in the cultural industries traditionof political economy, and the importanceof thinking about the distinctive character-istics of primarily symbolic production andconsumption, as opposed to other forms(see above). The practical implications ofsuch thinking, according to Garnham’s paper,were that ‘debates, organizational energy

and finance’ ought to be redirected towardsbroadcasting, the ‘heartland of contemporarycultural practice’, towards the developmentof libraries (the recipient of over 50 per centof all public expenditure on culture) and inproviding loans and services to small andmedium-sized cultural businesses in Londonfor the marketing and dissemination of theirproducts (Garnham, 1990: p. 166).

There was a second major element toGLC cultural industries strategy, which sawpublic investment in this sector as a means toeconomic regeneration. As Garnham pointedout in a later retrospective (2001), this hadno necessary connection to the quite separateargument about shifting the focus of policyfrom the artist to the audience. It was also lessnovel, in that the use of cultural initiativesto boost the image of cities was under wayelsewhere (Bianchini and Parkinson, 1993).Such policies were often directed towards theboosting of tourism and/or retail in an area,or towards making an area attractive as alocation for businesses, rather than towardsthe democratization of cultural provision. Inthe late 1980s and 1990s such strategiesboomed and spread across the world. Notablecases included Glasgow’s remarkable successin becoming European City of Culture forthe year 1990. Expensive flagship projectsoften based around adventurous architectureproliferated, the best-known of which wasprobably the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,opened in 1997, which succeeded in makingpost-industrial Bilbao a tourist attraction.Such projects have been controversial locally,but voices of criticism are rarely heardinternationally.

Because the GLC was abolished in 1986,its cultural industry policies were neverimplemented in London. Nevertheless, localcultural policy under the banner of the culturalindustries was to have a big impact over thefollowing decade. In many cities, culturalindustries policies became bound up withbroader strategies to use culture for urbanregeneration. But the rise of local culturalindustries policy, initially in the form of‘cultural quarters’in post-industrial cities, wasnot entirely a result of the appeal of GLC’s



pragmatic anti-idealist egalitarianism. In fact,in many cases, the idea of cultural industriespolicy chimed with a fast-growing desire inthe 1980s and 1990s to think about all areasof public policy, including culture and media,in terms of a return on public investment. Thekey context here is the steady rise and generalacceptance of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is a word that is sometimesused too easily and too glibly. But it is still auseful term to describe an underlying rationalefor government policy which proposes that‘human well-being can best be advancedby liberating individual entrepreneurial free-doms and skills within an institutional frame-work characterized by strong private propertyrights, free markets, and free trade’ (Harvey,2005: p. 2). Cultural industries policy wasfounded on a recognition, ultimately derivedfrom a properly sophisticated reading ofMarx, of the ambivalence of markets. Thislinked up with an increasing questioning, asa result of broader sociocultural changes, ofthe legitimacy of ‘high cultural’ forms. Inthis context, the use of money to promote‘ordinary’ culture was seen as anti-elitist –and this contributed to the popularity ofcultural industries policies with many left-wing councils in Europe. The problem wasthat, by the 1990s, as neoliberalism emergedtriumphant, recognition of the importance ofcultural markets could soon be turned, inpractice, into an accommodation with themarket, as the critical elements in the originalGLC vision were lost. The roots of suchpolicies in a more hopeful early 1980s context,based on bottom-up, grassroots interventions,gave a democratizing sheen to policies withvery different aims.

So it was that in the 1990s, the notion ofthe cultural industries or the cultural sectorbecame increasingly attached, in a new eraof local and regional development policy, tothe goals of regeneration and employmentcreation. It was the second element of GLCpolicy that was often emphasized, not thefirst, now bound up not only with culture-ledurban regeneration strategies, but also with anincreasing emphasis on entrepreneurialism, inthe private and public sectors. In a pamphlet

written for the think tank Demos, for example,Kate Oakley and Charles Leadbeater (a figureassociated with the GLC, who by the late1990s was closely linked to the British ‘NewLabour’ project personified and led by TonyBlair) outlined their view that entrepreneurs inthe cultural industries provided a new modelof work and a key basis for local economicgrowth, in that their local, tacit know-how –‘a style, a look, a sound’ – showed ‘how citiescan negotiate a new accommodation with theglobal market’ (Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999:p. 14). The view that independent culturalproduction might be connected to widermovements for progressive social change,implicit in at least some of the GLC work,was by now being steadily erased, in favourof a view much more compatible withcontemporary British neoliberalism.

A very important further connection waswith new developments in arts policy,whereby institutions increasingly sought tolegitimize their funding on the basis of itscontribution to a somewhat uncomfortableand potentially contradictory mixture ofeconomic and social goals. An influentialthough controversial report by economistJohn Myerscough (1988), for example, put thecultural industries together with the arts, andanalysed how they contributed to job creation,tourism promotion, invisible earnings andurban regeneration (see Belfiore, 2002, fora survey of arts policy developments in thisdomain in the UK). Alongside such develop-ments, many arts policy-makers also sought tojustify arts subsidy on the basis that the arts,and the cultural industries increasingly linkedto them in policy discourse, could contributeto combating social exclusion – a new termwhich spread like wildfire through Europeansocial policy in the 1990s. Some analystssee social exclusion as a term which allowsthose who use it to avoid consideration ofdeep-seated structural inequalities, includingclass (see, for example, Levitas, 1998). Thesedevelopments were to have an importanteffect at the national policy level, as weshall see.

This is not to say that all such localcultural industries policies were ineffective,



that they all represented an accommodationwith neoliberalism, or with new centristforms of policy. In some cases, policy-makerswith a genuine desire to promote new andinteresting forms of cultural activity withinan area, and to provide support for strug-gling entrepreneurs and practitioners, couldpersuade local government to provide fundingby talking about the regenerative possibilitiesof cultural industries development. In somecases (for example, in Sheffield, in thenorth of England) such policies were ableto support local infrastructures, to the lastingbenefit of symbol creators who wanted towork in the city (see Frith, 1993). But theeconomic and social effectiveness of localcultural policies oriented towards the culturalindustries remains controversial. It surelymade sense to emphasize the importanceof the cultural industries to a news andentertainment hub city such as London, andsuch a policy direction may have had somecoherence in some smaller but substantialcities where the cultural industries have somegrowing presence, but in other places theidea that investment in the cultural industriesmight boost local wealth and employment hasproven more problematic. Mark Jayne (2004),for example, has written about the difficultiesa local council had in developing an effectivecultural industries development policy inStoke-on-Trent, in the English Midlands, acity with an overwhelmingly working-classpopulation. The issue of class is significanthere. Much of the burgeoning policy discourse(and associated academic literature) seemsimplicitly to portray working-class popula-tions as regressive, as holding back cities fromentering into competition with the thrivingmetropolises of the West. This has led somecommentators to wonder about the dangers offoisting inappropriately metropolitan policieson predominantly working-class or ruralplaces.

Nevertheless, cultural industries policieshave made a contribution to people’s livesin ‘unlikely’ areas. Chris Gibson and DanielRobinson (2004) have written about a smallentertainment industry association on the farnorth coast of New South Wales, hundreds

of miles from Sydney and other urban areasfurther south. They acknowledge that theeffects of such an association on employmentand economic activity are very hard to ascer-tain, because of the perennial data problemsin this area. But they say that the asso-ciation’s campaigns (keeping venues open,putting on events, getting better remunerationfor musicians, publicizing activity throughawards, and so on) helped to encourageyoung aspiring creative workers to stay,and thereby encouraged a sense that theremight be an interesting and rewarding culturallife in the region. In other words, fundingsuch grassroots cultural industries institutionsmay have other, less directly economic butnevertheless positive benefits.

THE RISE OF CREATIVITY: CITIES,CLUSTERS AND UK NATIONAL POLICY

By the mid-1990s in Europe, two relatedconcepts had begun to grow out of culturalquarter policies, each of which was thesubject of a great deal of policy interest:creative cities and creative clusters. Theseterms represent an important shift in thepolicy vocabulary surrounding the culturalindustries. The former idea was strongly asso-ciated with the Comedia consultancy group.In Comedia booklets and policy documents(for example, Landry, 2000), creativity waspresented as the key to urban regenerationand the main reason given was that ‘theindustries of the twenty-first century willdepend increasingly on the generation ofknowledge through creativity and innovationmatched with rigorous systems of control’(Landry and Bianchini, 1995: p. 12). In thisnew creativity discourse, television, softwareand theatre were examples of such industries,but so was dealing in stocks and shares – andthey all needed creative cities to help themthrive. A number of examples of creativityin local planning and policy were offered byLandry and Bianchini, including the culture-led urban regeneration strategies referred toabove. How these were to induce creativityin a city’s inhabitants was not made clear.



But by the turn of the century, the culturalindustries were being thoroughly incorporatedinto a more general notion of creativity as aboon to a city’s ills.

The idea of creative clusters has beeneven more significant in local policy thanthat of creative cities. The concept of thebusiness cluster is derived from the work ofUS economist Michael Porter, which attemptsto explain how nations and regions gaincompetitive advantage over others. An impor-tant element, which distinguishes it fromolder theories, such as that of the nineteenth-century economist Alfred Marshall, of whyfirms from the same industry tend to gatherin the same places, is its emphasis on thenotions of innovative entrepreneurialism andcompetitiveness fetishisized in neo-liberaldiscourses of the ‘new economy’ (Martinand Sunley, 2003). This has made ‘businessclusters’ a hugely influential concept innational and regional government policyacross the world. Unsurprisingly perhaps, inthe late 1990s, policy-makers concerned withthe development of the cultural industriesadapted the term by linking it to the risingcult of creativity in management, businessand government and using the term ‘creativeclusters’.

For Hans Mommaas (2004: p. 508) ‘cul-tural clustering strategies represent a nextstage in the on-going use of culture and thearts as urban regeneration resources’. Onceall major cities had developed their festivals,major museums and theatre complexes inthe culture-led urban regeneration boom ofthe 1990s, the action moved on to creatingmilieux for cultural production. However, like‘business cluster’, the creative cluster is anidea built on a shaky conceptual foundation.Mommaas distinguishes between a number ofdiscourses, which have tended to be mergedtogether in policy discussions of the benefitsof creative clusters, and which in his view arein danger of undermining and contradictingeach other. These include promoting culturaldiversity and democracy, place-marketing inthe interests of tourism and employment,stimulating a more entrepreneurial approachto the arts and culture, a general encouraging

of innovation and creativity, and finding anew use for old buildings and derelict sites.Mommaas notes that while some clusteringstrategies are limited to artistic-cultural activ-ities, most of them incorporate many otherleisure and entertainment elements – bars,health and fitness complexes and the like.

Development strategies based on the cul-tural industries have proliferated across theworld in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Itcannot be automatically assumed that suchstrategies are entirely about a dubious form ofgentrification. They need to be assessed caseby case and it remains important to distinguishbetween top-down versions of such strategies,which come close to simply making citiesmore accommodating for business-peoplewho want a funky lifestyle, and bottom-upapproaches which take account of the needsof people across a range of social classesand ethnic groups. Nevertheless, it seems tobe the case that the democratizing intent inthe original GLC strategy by this stage ofcultural industries policy had become deeplysubmerged.

Cultural policy analyst Justin O’Connorhas recently reflected on this latest stage inlocal cultural industries strategy (manifestedin initiatives across much of the world). Heseeks to correct a number of misconceptions inwhat he sees as an overly celebratory literatureconcerning the insertion of local – especiallyurban – sites of cultural production into theglobal circulation of cultural products. Oneis the view that clusters of local culturalproducers derive their success from creativityand other forms of local, tacit knowledge(including the genius loci). According to suchviews, which can be found in the workof the Comedia consultancy and elsewhere,cities and regions can gain competitiveadvantage because such knowledge cannoteasily be codified and therefore transferred.In fact, says O’Connor, successful clustersare increasingly predicated not so much onthe much-vaunted ‘creativity’ but on accessto a range of formal knowledges, aboutglobal markets, about larger companies andabout distribution networks. To miss this,says O’Connor, is to miss the reality of local



policy: few of the agencies set up to helpnascent cultural industries have this kind ofknowledge (O’Connor, 2004: p. 139). ButO’Connor is making a broader point too. Theemphasis on using ‘creativity’ and urbanityfor the competitive advantage of cities risksgoing beyond a reconciliation of economicsand culture to being an annexation of the latterby the former (O’Connor, 2004: p. 146).

National creative industries policy

By the late 1990s, the term ‘creativity’ hadspread to the national policy level in theUK. Creative industries is a concept that hassince been widely adopted in the spheres ofcultural policy and higher education. Its firstmajor policy use appears to have been by theBritish Labour government elected in 1997,though there were important precedents inother countries, notably the Australian Laborgovernment’s Creative Nation initiative of1994. In Britain at least, one basis for theadoption of the term ‘creative industries’was that it allowed cultural policy-makers(whether concerned with arts, crafts or filmproduction) to legitimize their concerns atthe national level. This was an attempt torepeat at the national level the strategy oflinking ‘the arts’ to the cultural industries,so that even these most refined of activitiescould be made to seem part of economicdevelopment, the sine qua non of mostgovernment policy in the era of neoliberalism.However, national creative industries policygoes further than this.

Nicholas Garnham (2001: p. 25; see alsoGarnham, 2005) has identified two majorclaims implicitly made by the mobilizationof the term ‘creative industries’ in the Britishcontext: that the creative industries are thekey new growth sector of the economy, bothnationally and globally; and that they aretherefore the key source of future employmentgrowth and export earnings. For Garnham,the use of the term ‘creative’ achieved anumber of goals with regard to these claims.In the first instance, it allowed a very broaddefinition. Various documents issued by theUK Department of Culture, Media and Sport

(for example, DCMS 1998, 2001) includedthe industries labelled the ‘cultural industries’by the political-economy cultural industriesanalysts (essentially, the media – see above)but also dance, visual arts and the more craft-based activities of jewellery-making, fashionand furniture design. This made it possible tolink these subsidized sectors to the supposedlybooming commercial creative industries ofmusic and broadcasting. It also, crucially,included computer software, which made itpossible to present the creative industriessector as a much larger and more significantpart of the economy than would otherwisehave been possible.2

According to Garnham, this broad defini-tion in turn had two valuable policy conse-quences for the interest groups involved. First,it enabled software producers and the majorcultural-industry conglomerates to constructan alliance with smaller businesses and withcultural workers around a strengthening ofintellectual property protection. Crucial herewas the way that the defence of intellectualproperty became associated with ‘the moralprestige of the “creative artist” ’ (Garnham,2005: p. 26). Second, it enabled the culturalsector to use arguments for the public supportof the training of creative workers originallydeveloped for the ICT industry. This argumentin turn had much wider implications in that itpushed education policy much more stronglyin the direction of a discourse of skills, on thebasis that future national prosperity dependedupon making up for a supposed lack ofcreative, innovative workers. The result forGarnham is that UK creative industries policyis more than ever based on an ‘artist’-centrednotion of subsidy, rather than an audience-oriented policy of infrastructural support – thevery opposite, in other words, of the originalGLC vision.

The key point here is that while the terms‘cultural industries’ and ‘creative industries’superficially share a rejection of forms of cul-tural policy grounded on subsidy for the finearts, and a concern with the specific dynamicsof symbolic production and circulation, theterms – in the Northern European context atleast – tend to denote very different modes



of theoretical policy analysis. Those whoprefer the term ‘cultural industries’ tend to bemuch more sober in their claims regardingthe role of culture or creativity in moderneconomies and societies, and, as we shall see,considerably more sceptical about the benefitsof marketization in the domain of culture, thanwhat we might call the creativity or creativeindustries theorists.

In the 2000s, policy using the termscultural industries and creative industrieshas spread across much of the world, bothat the national and sub-national (local orregional) levels. There has been a relentlessflow of mapping documents and developmentstrategies. There is no space here to tracein any detail the many and complex waysin which the terms have been taken upoutside Northern Europe. Some governmentshave followed the ‘British model’ of creativeindustries in terms of definition and policyorientation. Some have preferred the term‘cultural industries’ even while pursuingpolicies more akin to what, based on thedominant Northern European uses, I am herecalling ‘creative industries policy’. Issues oftranslation and of local context mean thatthe terms have quite different connotationsfrom Europe. The People’s Republic of China(PRC) provides one significant example. The16th Congress of the Chinese CommunistParty in 2002 declared the developmentof cultural industries (wenhua chanye) asa key task in the tenth Five Year Plan.Jing Wang (2004: p. 16) explains thatwenhua chanye has a very different setof connotations than its English equivalent,because chanye contains a double referenceto chanquan (property ownership) and shiye(public institutions). The nearest equivalent to‘creative industries’(chuangyi gongye), Wangfelt, lacked these connotations, and divertedattention away from crucial issues aboutstock-market flotation and privatization andtowards a less immediately relevant agendaof small and medium-sized enterprises, andartistic creativity (rather than innovation). Inpolicy discussions in China, the English term‘creative’ is often preferred. Nevertheless,Desmond Hui (2006: pp. 317–319) reports

that the Beijing Party Committee adoptedthe term ‘cultural and creative industries’ forits development strategy in December 2005.Such a conjoined use is likely to become morecommon in many non-European contexts.But for all these complexities, it remains thecase that many non-European governmentshave looked to Northern European policiesfor inspiration as they seek ways to expandtheir cultural or creative industries – andthat the terms cultural industries and creativeindustries represent quite different lineages.

CREATIVITY AND CREATIVEINDUSTRIES THEORY

In the next section, I will look at thework of cultural researchers who are broadlyadvocates of the kinds of creative industriespolicy delineated above; I then proceed toexamine attempts to critique the idea of thecreative industries.

These policy developments have meant thatin recent years there has been a rising tideof academic interest in creativity and thecreative industries. ‘Creativity’ is an evenlooser word than culture and there can belittle doubt that this has enabled a numberof analysts to put forward the kinds ofclaims summarized by Garnham, regardingthe role of cultural production in moderneconomies. Policy consultant and journalistJohn Howkins, for example, claimed inan influential and widely read book that‘the creative economy will be the dominanteconomic form in the twenty-first century’(Howkins, 2001: p. vii). Howkins sustainedthis claim by defining the creative economyand the creative industries as those involvedin intellectual property. This allowed him toinclude not only those industries based oncopyright, which is the basis of the culturalindustries as they are most usefully defined (asessentially the media industries – see above),but also those industries that produce or deal inpatent. This meant that massive sectors such aspharmaceuticals, electronics, engineering andchemicals could be added into ‘the creativeeconomy’ mix. Even the impossibly nebulous



categories of trademark and design industrieswere incorporated. Howkins was right tostress the importance of intellectual propertyin modern economies, across both symbolicand scientific domains, but he extrapolatedfrom this to make dubious claims abouta transition to a new economy based oncreativity.

Perhaps the most ardent treatment of therole of creativity in modern economies hascome from the US academic and policyconsultant Richard Florida. Florida makesthe cheering assertion that while most tran-sition theories tend to see transformationas something that is happening to people,in fact society is mostly changing becausewe want it to, and the driving force ofthese desired changes is ‘the rise of humancreativity as the key factor in our economyand society’ (Florida, 2002: p. 4). For Florida,the new centrality of creativity has led to achange in the class system itself, with therise of ‘a new creative class’, comprising anastounding 30 per cent of all employed UScitizens: a creative core of people in scienceand engineering, architecture and design,education, arts, music and entertainment; andthen an outer group of creative professionalsin business and finance, law, health care andrelated fields. As will be clear from this, theinflated claims about creativity again derivefrom lumping together a very diverse setof activities. But such claims clear the wayfor Florida to address himself to policy-makers. In a version of the Comedia argumentabout creative cities, Florida says that creativepeople want to live in creative cities, andif cities want to attract these often wealthyand influential creative people to live, andto spend their hard and creatively earnedmoney on local taxes and local services, thengovernments will need to foster ‘a creativecommunity’ in their cities.

Florida is without doubt the most importantacademic popularizer and legitimator ofthe idea that creativity is central to neweconomies. A more substantial attempt toground this idea has emerged from a group ofresearchers at Queensland University of Tech-nology in Brisbane, Australia. John Hartley

and Stuart Cunningham have explained theiradoption of ‘creative industries’ (Hartley andCunningham, 2001) as a key term in culturalpolicy – and indeed in cultural education.First, they say, it offers an opportunity tomove beyond the elitist wastefulness of artssubsidy. Second, it moves beyond limitationsin the concept of cultural industries which intheir view (a mistaken one in my opinion) isa term associated with the old arts-orientedform of cultural policy. For them, by contrast,the term creative industries fits with thepolitical, cultural and technological landscapeof globalization, the new economy, and theinformation society. Echoing writers such asJohn Howkins, creativity and innovation arepresented as the basis of the new economy.But governments need to look beyond scienceand engineering conceptions of innovation,say Hartley and Cunningham. Policy needsto combine the promotion of this growingsector of local economies with the fosteringof creative urban spaces. Education needsto change too: arts and humanities facultiesshould be reoriented towards training studentsin the production of content.

Cunningham and Hartley were writinga manifesto for policy-makers and highereducation managers. Terry Flew, also at QUT,has provided a fuller rationale for an emphasison creative industries in both cultural andeducational policy (here I concentrate on onepiece – Flew, 2005). Flew questions, from aperspective informed by Foucauldian govern-mentality theory, the emphasis on citizenshipamongst social democratic policy-makers andacademic advocates of reform. For Flew,‘there is a need for caution in too readilyinvoking cultural citizenship as a progressivecultural goal’ (Flew, 2005: p. 244) becausecitizenship conceptions underestimate thedegree to which culture has been used bystates as part of top-down nationalist projects,and the degree to which rights have involvedexclusions as well as reciprocal obligationsbetween state and subject. Flew asserts thatsuch policies – for example, in post-warFrance – have also tended to neglect the com-mercial sector in favour of elitist arts subsidy.What is more, globalization, the rise of new



media technologies such as satellite and theInternet, and the increasing incorporation ofculture into economic life mean a new set ofchallenges for policy institutions. In Flew’sview, rather than protecting national and localcontent, the aim should be to promote theability of a nation to create content, in a waythat avoids ‘top-down nationalism and pre-ordained conceptions of cultural value’ (Flew,2005: p. 251). Rather than grounding culturalpolicy in an opposition to the market or incultural protectionism, Flew offers the OpenSource software movement as an alternativeparadigm, based on the decentralizing forceof the Internet and on new conceptions ofthe public interest, where the state acts asa guarantor of competition, innovation andpluralism, rather than a buttress against themarket, and the idea is to let a millionmulticultural and globalized publics bloom,rather than to advocate particular directionsfor cultural policy.

Such an account raises some difficultissues. First, Flew and other advocates ofnew conceptions of the public interest placegreat faith in the democratizing impact ofthe Internet; but there are good reasons towonder whether the Internet can validly beseen in this way: including, not least, markedinequalities in access, both within individualnation-states and between nations and regions.Second, although the idea of a policy thatwould move beyond the dubious impositionof cultural value is likely on its surface tobe attractive to anyone but the most ardentcultural conservative, the problem of aestheticvalue will not simply go away. If the roleof cultural policy (and arts and humanitieseducation) is to act as an R&D wing ofthe creative industries – which is the QUTgroup’s explicit goal – then it may well bethat it is the market’s (i.e. in this case, thecultural or creative industries) conceptionsof value which will prevail. Like those ofnation-states, these values are multiple andcontradictory, and indeed this is somethingemphasized by cultural industries theory. Butin a context where massive corporations stillcontrol the circulation and dissemination ofculture (even in the era of the Internet) we

may be unwise to opt too quickly in favourof a strongly market-oriented system over a‘top-down nationalism’ which is portrayed inmonolithic terms, characteristic of much glob-alization theory, as a force for oppression andexclusion. Third, Flew shows the influence ofpost-structuralist cultural studies, by focusingon questions of difference and identity, to theexclusion of systemic economic processes.There is a lack of attention to the way capitalistmarkets repeatedly (though not in any pre-defined way) work with other processes toproduce inequalities of access and outcome –in the domain of culture, as in many otheraspects of society.

CRITIQUING CREATIVE INDUSTRIESPOLICY AND THEORY

I have focused here on the work of a groupof academic researchers based in Queenslandbecause they provide the most coherentattempt to delineate what one might call acentrist or accommodationist position withregard to government policy on the creativeindustries. What I mean by this is that theybroadly accept the position underlying themost influential forms of creative industriespolicy: that the creative industries are akey new growth sector of economies, bothnationally and globally; and that they aretherefore the key source of future employmentgrowth and export earnings. The expansionof local cultural markets is therefore seenas the best way to combine both economicand cultural well-being. As I write, however,there is an increasing interest in developingcritiques of the notion of the creativeindustries as it operates in contemporarypolicy discourse. In this next section, I wantbriefly to consider some versions of suchcritique, in order to assess how effectivelythey question developments in the role ofcultural production in modern societies. Mymain concern here is theoretical – withcriticism focused on the underlying principlesand assumptions of policy. First, though, itmust be recognized that theory is always, toa greater or lesser degree, based on empirical



assumptions, whether stated or not; and thattherefore some of the empirical assumptionsunderlying creative industries theory needscrutinizing.

Kieran Healy (2002) has identified anumber of questions that might be asked aboutthe role of creativity in the new economyas identified by writers such as Howkinsand Florida. In particular he separates outfour claims concerning why the relationshipsbetween the so-called creative sector and thenew economy might matter to policy-makers:

• Claim 1: The ‘creative sector’ will continue to grow,justifying more policy research in this area. Thisis the easiest claim to defend, says Healy, but itestablishes little in itself. What kind of policies?Can there be any shared policy agenda amongstthe very varied interests involved?

• Claim 2: The creative sector is a miner’s canary forthe wider economy because of its uncertain labourmarkets, flexible collaboration and project-basedwork. But, Healy asks, is the project work of aproject-based stage actor really relevant to thoseof a project-based systems administrator? Is theartistic labour force a good model given problemsof labour markets there?

• Claim 3: Creativity in general is becomingincreasingly important to competitiveness. This,says Healy, is not established, and demand fordifferent kinds of creative people will be veryunequal across different industries and sectors.

• Claim 4: The so-called ‘creative class’ is intenselyinterested in cultural goods of many kinds, so citiesshould invest in culture. As Healy says, this isunlikely to be uniform.

Healy’s scrutiny of the empirical claimsunderlying creative industries discourseis useful. However, such scrutiny leavesuntouched a deeper set of questionsconcerning the way in which culturalproduction operates in modern economies,and this involves the status of culture itself,in relation to society and economy. Whatdoes the boom in creativity and the creativeindustries tell us about the relations betweenculture, society and economy at the beginningof the twenty-first century? One avenue forcritiquing these developments (not the onlyone, but there is limited space here) has

been to focus on the question of creative orartistic labour, which Healy draws attentionto, above. There is certainly no space inthe present context to address the detailedempirical and quantitative work that has beendone on these labour markets (see Menger,1999, for a very useful survey) but RuthTowse (1992) has provided a neat summaryof the findings of a wide range of studiesof artistic labour markets. These have thefollowing features, says Towse. Artists tendto hold multiple jobs; there is a predominanceof self-employed or freelance workers, workis irregular, contracts are shorter-term, andthere is little job protection; career prospectsare uncertain; earnings are very unequal;artists are younger than other workers;and the workforce appears to be growing.By ‘artistic’, Towse means the subsidizedarts sector, but these features would seemalso to apply very much to artistic (andinformational) labour in the cultural andcreative industries. If that is so, then policiesthat argue for a radical expansion of theseindustries under present conditions, withoutattention to the conditions of creative labour,risk fuelling labour markets marked byirregular, insecure and unprotected work.This in turn suggests that cultural labourmight indeed be one important way in whichcreative industries policy (and theory) mightbe criticized.

In what follows, I will focus on threeways in which labour has become a partof a critical analysis of cultural policyunder the sign of the creative industries:the idea of a ‘new international division ofcultural labour’; the focus on creative work inautonomist Marxism; and a more sociologicalapproach that helps to show some of thelimitations of even the most sophisticatedpolitical economy critiques. My emphasisis on the theoretical and political problemsplaguing these critiques. At the moment, itseems to me, serious attention to cultural workrepresents something of a gap in the analysisof creative and cultural industries. Critiquingsome of the critiques of cultural work mayhelp to construct a more secure foundation forboth theory and policy.



CREATIVE LABOUR AS THE BASIS FORA CRITIQUE OF CREATIVE INDUSTRIESPOLICY

A new international divisionof cultural labour?

In numerous publications since the early1990s, the US-based academic Toby Miller,sometimes with collaborators, has developedthe idea of a new international division ofcultural labour, which he abbreviates to NICL.This concept is adapted from the Marxian ideaof a New International Division of Labour(or NIDL).3 This purported to analyse theemergence of a new capitalist world economy,involving massive movements of capital fromdeveloped countries to low-cost productionsites in developing countries, exploiting ahuge global reserve of labour. Such mobilityof capital clearly had implications not only forthe power of labour, but also for the capacityof national democratic governments to act inthe interests of its populations. Controversiesover the idea of the NIDL rest on the degreeto which such movements of capital reallyrepresent a new feature of contemporarycapitalism. But how does this idea get trans-lated into the cultural domain? In the latestversion of the NICL idea, which appears inthe book Global Hollywood 2 (Miller, Govil,McMurria, Maxwell and Wang, 2005) thereseem to be four main manifestations of thephenomenon: the purchase of, or partnershipwith, non-US firms by US corporations andfinancial institutions; the use of cheaper sitesoverseas for animation; the harmonizationof copyright law and practice; and run-away production – the practice of shootingHollywood films overseas. Miller and his co-authors on the chapter on NICL (Wang andGovil) concentrate overwhelmingly on thelatter, outlining the ways in which variousnational governments seek to attract suchrunaway productions (all the more so, underthe creative industries policy that is nowspreading through various countries). Theydo so not only for the local employmentthat location shooting provides, but also forthe potential secondary effects of tourism.

The implication is that state policies are failingto set up their own dynamic bourgeoisies,but instead remain ‘locked in a dependentunderdevelopment that is vulnerable to disin-vestment’ (Miller et al., 2005: p. 140). Miller,Wang and Govil recognize that responsesfrom US-based cultural workers to the lossof income and benefits involved in suchoffshoring of audio-visual production cansometimes descend into a chauvinistic Yanquicultural nationalism. But they argue that thereis some reason behind US cultural workers’problems: the threat to their livelihoods, theloss of local US culture (as legitimate aconcern as the arguments made in support ofnational cinemas, say Miller et al., though thismay be arguable) and the massive control ofcorporations over their destinies.

Miller, Wang and Govil’s treatment helpsexpose ways in which policies aimed atboosting national creative industries canaffect workers elsewhere. It shows hownationalism can feed exploitation, insecurityand casualization. These seem to me to beimportant issues for any analyst concernedwith questions of equality and social justicewith regard to culture. And yet somehow theconcept of the NICL does not seem to addmuch theoretical value to a consideration ofcultural labour. What, for example, distin-guishes the division of cultural labour fromother divisions of labour? To what extent isthis ‘new’ division of labour really new? Andif it is really new enough to merit that epithet,what dynamics drove it? When and underwhat conditions did it emerge? The NICLseems to work more as a rhetorical deviceintended to draw attention to exploitationand injustice, rather than as a theoreticalconcept addressing complex dynamics andcontradictions. While such rhetorical devicescan be useful, for a theoretical understandingof cultural work adequate for groundingcritique of creative industries policy, we willneed to look elsewhere.

Autonomist Marxism

In recent years, an attractive option for manyintellectuals seeking theoretically informed

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Wang and Govil

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Wang and Govil’s

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AQ: Sould the heighlighted be Miler et al.?



critique of developments in contemporarycapitalism has been autonomist Marxism,most famously the work of Michael Hardtand Antonio Negri, in their books Empire(2000) and Multitude (2004). These booksoffer an ambitious and very sweeping accountof economic, political and social change.This includes, in Empire, considerations ofchanges in work, including reflections onthe concept of immaterial labour – ‘laborthat produces an immaterial good, such asa service, a cultural product, knowledge,or communication’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000:p. 290) – drawing upon the earlier work ofMaurizio Lazzarato. For some analysts, theconcept of immaterial labour, directed as it istowards the production of culture, knowledgeand communication, offers promising terrainfor a critical analysis of forms of workassociated with the cultural and creativeindustries.

For Hardt and Negri, the introduction ofthe computer has radically transformed work.Even where direct contact with computers isnot involved, they say, the manipulation ofsymbols and information ‘along the model ofcomputer operation’ is extremely widespread.Workers used to act like machines, nowthey increasingly think like computers. Theymodify their operations through use, andthis continual interactivity characterizes awide range of contemporary production.The computer and communication revolutionof production has transformed labouringpractices in such a way that they alltend towards the model of information andcommunication technologies. This means ahomogenization of labouring processes. Inthis respect, Hardt and Negri are pessimisticabout the ‘informationalization’ of the econ-omy. But they also discern another face ofimmaterial labour, involving the affectivelabour of human contact and interaction.Here they seem to have in mind caring andhealth work, heavily gendered, and muchanalysed by feminists. Such affective labour,they claim, produces social networks andcommunities, and cooperation is immanent tosuch labouring activity (and also, it seems, in atypical moment of incoherence, to other more

computer-driven forms of immaterial labour).Because wealth creation takes place throughsuch cooperative interactivity, ‘immateriallabour thus seems to provide the potentialfor a kind of spontaneous and elementarycommunism’ (p. 294).

It is this combination of rampantlyoptimistic Marxism, combined with a post-structuralist concern with questions of sub-jectivity and affect, that has helped to makeHardt and Negri’s work so popular amongstcontemporary left intellectuals. On the basisof their work alone, the notion of immateriallabour could not be the basis of a seriouscritique of the creative industries. But theautonomist Marxian tradition they have bothdrawn upon and radically popularized doeshave the advantage of drawing attention tosome important ambivalences in the growthof creative or cultural labour encouraged(or demanded) by creative industries policy.Hardt and Negri’s ambivalence seems toopolarized, founded on an opposition betweenthe potential for commonality in networkedforms of communication, and the insecurityof workers undertaking immaterial labour.These ambivalences are explored tentativelybut with more regard for the specifics of policyinstitutions, in an article by Brett Neilsonand Ned Rossiter (2005) on the conceptsof precarity and precariousness. For Neilsonand Rossiter, immaterial labour (and variantsupon it) contain ‘potentialities that springfrom workers’ own refusal of labour andsubjective demands for flexibility – demandsthat in many ways precipitate capital’sown accession to interminable restructur-ing and rescaling’ (Neilson and Rossiter,2005: p. 1). The term they use for thisstate is precarity, ‘an inelegant neologismcoined by English speakers to translate theFrench precarité’. The term refers to manydifferent forms of ‘flexible exploitation’,including illegal, seasonal and temporaryemployment; homeworking, subcontractingand freelancing; so-called self-employment.But the sense of the term extends beyondwork to encompass other aspects of lifeincluding housing, debt and social relations.Importantly, precarity is not a term used



exclusively by academics; it has been usedwidely by social movements as the basis ofevents and campaigns directed against theinsecurity and casualization characteristic ofmodern forms of work – including the declineof welfare provision. Neilson and Rossiterin effect accuse creative industries policy ofneglecting and effacing both sides of thisprecarity. One side is the precarious andinsecure conditions faced by most workers,and absent from government policy. The otheris the complexity and promiscuity of actualnetworks of cultural production, reduced in‘mapping documents’ to value-chains andclusters.

A sociology of creative labour

Autonomist Marxism’s greatest weakness isthat it lacks an empirical engagement with thespecifics of cultural production. It might bethought that sociologies of cultural productionmight fill this gap. The problem is that, whilethere have been many studies of individualindustries, there have been very few sociologi-cally informed attempts to understand culturalproduction as a whole (see Hesmondhalgh,2005, for a survey). The most in-depth studyof work in the cultural industries (as opposedto studies of working in a particular industry,such as television) is provided by Bill Ryan,in his book Making Capital from Culture(1992). Ryan’s perspective here is stronglyinfluenced by the cultural industries versionof political economy outlined earlier, buthe analyses organizational dynamics in fargreater detail than writers such as Garnhamand Miège, using a Weberian framework.A Marxian influence is apparent in the waythat Ryan bases his account on a historicalunderstanding of the relations between artisticcreativity and capital. For Ryan, capital cannotmake the artist completely subservient tothe drive for accumulation. Because art iscentred on the expressive individual artist,artistic objects ‘must’ appear as the productof recognizable persons; the concrete andnamed labour of the artist is paramountand must be preserved. Artists appear tocapital as the antithesis of labour power,

antagonistic to incorporation as abstractlabour (which, in Ryan’s Marxian framing,is the capitalists’ prime concern becausethis determines exchange-value). Capitalistslengthen the working day or intensify thework process to achieve a relative increasein the unpaid component of abstract value(surplus value). Abstract and concrete labourare therefore in contradiction. Technologygeneralizes the concrete labour in the workprocess in many industries, but not in culturalindustries. For Ryan, therefore, the artist,as historically and ideologically constituted,‘represents a special case of concrete labourwhich is ultimately irreducible to abstractvalue’ (Ryan, 1992: p. 44). Art must alwaysappear as unique, and so ‘artistic workers …cannot be made to appear in the labour processas generalized, undifferentiated artists’ (Ryan,1992: p. 44). More than that, artistic labourdemands an even more identifiable specificity.They must be engaged as ‘named, concretelabour’.

For Ryan, the consequence of this con-tradiction is a certain relative autonomyfor creative workers, with stars gettingconsiderable freedom. In his view, this alsohelps fuel the irrationality, or at least thearationality, of the creative process. Forcapitalists, artists represent an investment invariable capital in a way that consistentlythreatens to undermine profitability. This alsoleads, according to Ryan, to contradictionsin the cultural commodity itself, whereby‘commoditization of cultural objects erodesthe qualities and properties which constitutethem as cultural objects, as use-values, inthe first place’, because it undermines thequest for originality and novelty that givesthe art product its aura of uniqueness. ForRyan, capital’s response is to rationalizecultural production, both at the creative stageand the circulation stage. Indeed, most ofhis book is framed as an examination ofthe extent to which capital has succeededin achieving such rationalization. This isachieved at the creative stage through ‘for-matting’, and at the circulation stage throughthe institutionalization of marketing withincorporate production, in order to produce



a more controllable sequence of stars andstyles.

Ryan’s account of methods of rational-ization provides a helpful way to explaincertain recurring strategies of capitalists inthe cultural sector, and he offers an impres-sive examination of these strategies acrossdifferent industries. However, Ryan’s strongemphasis on rationalization as a responseby capitalists to the irrationality producedby the art/capital contradiction leads tosome limitations in his approach. Relativelyautonomous work, generated by the art-capitalcontradiction, is implicitly portrayed as aprogressive force, and rationalization is seenas something imposed by capitalists uponthis freedom. But what if creative autonomyis itself a significant mechanism of powerwithin certain forms of work – includingmuch creative work in the cultural industries?This would have significant implicationsfor considering the way creative industriespolicy seems to offer a certain freedomand self-realization for workers, but in factoffers this freedom under certain power-laden conditions. And it is a question raisednot only by the cultural industries, but bydevelopments in a wide range of work incontemporary capitalism. While relentless,physically exhausting and highly routinizedwork remains a feature of a great deal of work,an important and growing stratum of jobspurports to offer what Andrew Ross (2003)has called a ‘humane workplace’ and self-realization through more autonomous formsof labour. Writing about work in the IT sector(a form of work which, as we have seen, isoften unhelpfully blurred with artistic labourin the notion of the creative industries), Rossclaims that, in the eyes of a new generation ofbusiness analysts in the 1980s, Silicon Valley‘appeared to promote a humane workplacenot as a grudging concession to demoralizedemployees but as a valued asset to production’(Ross, 2003: p. 9). Angela McRobbie (2002)has addressed these dynamics specificallywith regard to the British Labour Party’s dualendorsement both of the creative industriesand of hard work as the basis of socialwell-being. Drawing upon her own work on

young fashion designers, and other empiricalstudies, McRobbie notes (in Foucauldianvein) the way in which notions of passion for,and pleasure in, work serve as disciplinarydevices, enabling very high levels of (self-)exploitation. She also notes the extremely lowlevels of union organization in most culturalindustries.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Ross and McRobbie’s work represent impor-tant openings, because they join theoreticalsophistication with empirical sociologicalanalysis of the specific discourses of creativityand self-realization in particular industries.There is room, in my view, to combinetheir approaches with historical analysis ofchanging discourses of creative labour, andwith the sensitivity of the cultural industriesapproach to the specific conditions of culturalcapitalism. Such a synthesis would allow fora critique of arguments for the expansion ofcreative industries, at the local, national andinternational levels. This is not the only pos-sible route of critique. It might be allied, forexample, to criticisms of prevailing notionsof intellectual property at work in the culturalindustries (and there has been no space hereto explore such potential links). A coherentand empirically informed critique of culturalwork under contemporary capitalism mighthelp to prevent the danger in recent policydevelopments – that the original visions ofreform that motivated the cultural industriesidea might be permanently distorted and eveninverted. While creative industries policyand theory share with cultural industriesversions an emphasis on the specific dynamicsof making profit from the production anddissemination of primarily symbolic goods,it tends to work with loose and sometimesdubiously broad definitions of ‘creativity’.And, as I have explained in this chapter,policy and theory using the term ‘creativeindustries’ tend to be based on argumentswhich all too often come close to endorsinginequality and exploitation associated withcontemporary neoliberalisms.



NOTES

1 Because this is intended as an overview ofthe idea of the cultural industries, this chapterinevitably draws upon material published in thetwo editions of my book The Cultural Industries(Hesmondhalgh, 2002 and 2007). However, theargument has been substantially developed from thatmaterial.

2 This of course raises the wider question ofhow to measure the changing role of culture, orof the cultural industries, in modern economies (seeHesmondhalgh, 2007: chapter 6).

3 By far the best-known formulation of this ideais The New International Division of Labour (Fröbel,Heinrichs and Kreye, 1980).

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